The Shumway Open SWF Runtime Project

theweatherelectric writes "Mozilla is looking for contributors interested in working on Shumway. Mozilla's Jet Villegas writes, 'Shumway is an experimental web-native (Javascript) runtime implementation of the SWF file format. It is developed as a free and open source project sponsored by Mozilla Research. The project has two main goals: 1. Advance the open web platform to securely process rich media formats that were previously only available in closed and proprietary implementations. 2. Offer a runtime processor for SWF and other rich media formats on platforms for which runtime implementations are not available.'" See also: Gnash and Lightspark.

Bugs in the demo

[HatofPig]

In the race card demo [github.com] the "best lap" time is actually just your last lap. And when you finish all 10 laps the clock doesn't stop, so your "final time" keeps increasing. I wonder if this is a bug in Shumway or the game itself. And I only get around 7 FPS on average, on Firefox in Linux/x86.

Oh, boy!

[93 Escort Wagon]

Having experienced just how slowly pdf.js renders documents longer than a page or two - I can't WAIT to see how well implementing swf in javascript goes!

Does this mean we could possibly have CONTROL?

[fishnuts]

Does this mean developers might actually implement 'MUTE', 'FORCE STOP', or 'RESTART' context menu items for shockwave apps? I despise going to read a page with ads and other shockwave sidebar widgets that make noise or chew up CPU cycles and have no way to pause/mute/stop them. It also bugs that you must reload the entire page to get a flash app to restart.

It's beyond me why Macromedia/Adobe never wanted us to have those essential controls. The only thing we get, in some rare cases, are the ability to prevent the app/player from looping, or to turn down rendering quality.

Re:Oh, boy!

[tlhIngan]

I block flash and I block javascript. I only whitelist js for certain sites but mostly, its all blocked.

Which is why a browser-based method is better than a plugin-based method for stuff that Flash does. After all, if you allow Flash for one site, who knows what sorts of Javascript and resources it pulls from other sites?

But a browser based version or HTML5 means site-specific restrictions are honored - a Flash video that wants to pull in javascript from ad trackers can do it via the Flash plugin, but if it was in HTML5 or a browser implementation, will still remain blocked.

Re:Sounds great, would prefer ActionScript / Flex

[drkstr1]

We got our first "no flash" order on a project awhile back, and I have cried a little on the inside every day I have worked on it. My first introduction to flash was compiling SWFs in Linux using the MXMLC compiler. In fact, I even wrote the Actionscript 3 syntax highlighting rules for KDevelop (Kate) 3.5, because that's what I had available on my system to use. The flash platform is an AMAZING technology stack, and it is sad to see it go to waste behind a wall of patents wielded by a bafoon of a company.